PARTY POOPED
Super Sunday shindigs cut short by late starts
A“SIMPSONS” episode has Homer seated beside his boss, Mr. Burns — the miserly monopolist who owns Springfield’s nuclear plant.
“You know, Mr. Burns, you’re the richest guy I know.”
“Well, yes,” says Burns, “but I’d trade it all for a little more.”
What greed can do, greed gets done. Greed in our sports is a matter of TV money. It laps the field. Consider:
The NBA Finals are now a late prime-time show for more than half the nation’s populace, a means to generate maximum prime-time ad revenue in the four primary domestic time zones.
The next morning’s question has changed from, “What did you think of last night’s game?” to, “Did you stay up for last night’s game?”
Same with the World Series, as baseball’s championship starts later and needlessly, senselessly stretches to more than three and sometimes four hours. With work and school the next day, we watch the World Series alone until sleep sends us away.
Kids? Don’t be silly. Despite Rob Manfred’s laughable claim that kids are MLB’s top priority, kids don’t count. The ends of those late Sunday night ESPN Red Sox-Yankees telecasts and other Sunday games shifted from 1 p.m. have a better chance to be seen in Polynesia than Paramus.
As a kid, I never missed the end of a World Series game. Heresy! As an adult, I can’t fight sleep long enough to see their endings. Greed did that.
The Super Bowl used to be a mid-afternoon game. Friends and families would gather. Dips would be dipped, platters of Sloppy Joe’s — the Jewish or Gentile kind — would be eaten, the couch stuffed with kids and kin.
And afterward, in the early evening, all would go home to get ready for work and school the next day. Dad would take out the big bag filled with the day’s fun festivity trash. Mom would fill the vacuum cleaner with detritus of potato chips. See you next Super Bowl!
Call me a Norman Rockwell sap, it’s OK. But these parties were as Americana as apple pie.
Now the Super Bowl begins sometime after 6:30 to maximize TV revenue. Prime-time ratings on Sundays begin at 7 p.m., not 8 p.m. as on weeknights, and Sundays traditionally draw the most prime-time viewers, coast to coast. Sunday’s game will end around 10 p.m. — rather than at roughly 7 p.m., as it once did.
Few will be deprived of the game’s ending, but the all-in friends and family Super Bowl parties as an annual tradition have been diminished or lost to greed.
Tired will begin to set in at about halftime, even with the now annual promise that some entertainer or two will hold our attention with the promise of singing, saying or doing something vulgar to win next-day attention. What money can do, it does. Yeah, I know, I’m a grumpy old man. Been that way since I was 25. And plenty proud of it. Besides, I enjoyed neighborhood Super Bowl parties.